Francocentric Fiction

The art of infographics is a kind of visual rhetoric. It is an art of storytelling based on data. The data represented in the picture above (generated using a Raw open app.) tells two contrasting possible stories about the San-Antonio series, based on the place where the action is set. One is a story of international expansion and delocalisation of the plot, of multiple contacts with the world. It indicates a series of adventures scattered outside from France. The other, on the contrary, emphasizes the centrality of France, as the radiant matrix of the diegesis. Around it, the other countries travelled by the characters are side scenes and side kicks, satellites, distant archipelagos.

A streamgraph visualization shows the places where each adventures in the series are set as continuous data over a period of time, the fifty years during which the San-Antonio series were published. France (in Yellow) and to a lesser extent Switzerland (where the author lived from the mid 1960’s) in red, appear to form a basis, a foundation for the international adventures. It is from this recurring departure point that these can venture into new territory.

The opposition between a firm French and francophone basis and a great variety of fragmented destinations is highlighted even more clearly in this treemap representation. This visualization of data shows the hierarchies and proportion between countries in the San-Antonio Series. Each rectangle’s size is proportional to each country’s values.

Using instead a Graph of Clustered Force (provided by Raw open technologies), allows to visualize in a different way the proportion between plots set in France (represented by the blue circles) and the other elements. For a comparison, the orange circles represent settings of the action in England , yellow circles, USA settings, and the green Germany. This indicates their respective position inside a hierarchical structure dominated by France.

Finally, the following dendogram is another way of presenting a centrality of France, even compared with other countries frequently travelled in the series